Personal mobile (personal wireless) devices such as the palm-sized, consumer grade, iphone media device by Apple, Inc. of Cupertino, Calif., empower its owner to perform several communications and entertainment functions while on the go. These may include playback of stored MP3 music files, reading and sending email messages and surfing the Web (which started as solely desktop computer functions), and/or making and receiving roaming telephone calls (which initially was predominantly a cellular handset function).
The testing of personal wireless consumer devices in the manufacturing and research and development setting has been well established. For example, one wireless test fixture platform uses a nest as a custom component of the overall fixture design that interfaces the unique characteristics of a particular cellular telephone handset (device under test) to hardware that is part of a standard base unit. The nest contains connections and physical components that interface to the specific type device and to the standard base unit. These include button pushing hardware, speaker and microphone for audio testing, and galvanic RF interface. These interface components, located on the custom nest, are connected to the standard base unit hardware for control and automation. Different custom nests, created for testing different types of cellular handsets as well their constituent circuit boards and sub-assemblies, can be quickly swapped to test different devices.